Afghanistan faces a grim reality

Sep 27, 2012

specially for RIR

Nikolai Kozyrev

Over the past few years, the country’s leaders and international coalition forces may have succeeded in achieving certain changes, but no one could describe the present situation as stable. Source: Reuters/Vostock photo

Over the past few years, the country’s leaders and international coalition forces may have succeeded in achieving certain changes, but no one could describe the present situation as stable.

When we think of
Afghanistan, the picture that comes to mind is the one presented in the media –
a grim and dusty ravine hemmed in by treeless mountains; a highway along which
we see locals wearing turbans ambling mournfully and groups of foreign soldiers
with guns. A stand-off prevails; we expect disorder at any moment and then
explosions, gunfire and ambushes.

This is present-day
Afghanistan, where persistent civil war has been smouldering for more than
thirty years and entirely innocent Afghans are dying. What exactly is going on
in this Central Asian flashpoint? How did the current situation arise? And what
does Afghanistan’s future look like?

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The improvement of the
internal political situation in Afghanistan depends on a number of different
factors. The most important of these remains the degree of success in the war
against the Taliban, in other words, the war Afghanistan’s central government
is waging, alongside the international coalition, against the fighters of the
Taliban movement. This war is the decisive factor for the present government of
Afghanistan and for Afghan society in general, including the many tribal and
ethnic groupings operating within the armed contingents loyal to regional
warlords.

Over the past few
years, the country’s leaders and international coalition forces may have
succeeded in achieving certain changes, but no one could describe the present
situation as stable, and few causes for optimism can be discerned. These are
the words of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Bonn Conference on
Afghanistan in December 2011. Those circumstances continue to prevail.

The Afghan army and
police have grown to 330,000, while the ISAF and COP now number 152,000. By
contrast, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan are estimated at around
20,000–30,000 men. This rise in national forces has forced militants to shift
tactics from face-to-face fighting to more traditional methods of guerrilla
warfare, such as terrorist attacks, sabotage, ambushes and land-mines. While no
one in Afghanistan today is suggesting that Taliban forces could return to
Kabul within 2–3 days of a withdrawal of coalition troops, the situation
remains hazardous.

Terrorist attacks
follow one after another. These attacks recently forced foreign instructors to
pull out of training programmes with the Afghan police, an indicator of grave
significance. The Afghan army and police have likewise made insufficient
progress towards combat readiness and remain plagued by rampant corruption,
desertion and dismally low rates of pay.

The mood of Afghans is
affected by the fact that the central government has so far failed to breathe
life into the economy, improve living standards to any worthwhile degree or
reduce unemployment. Beyond all this, the Taliban cause is far from being
either destroyed or neutralised, and instead has spread to Pakistan, an
indicator of the escalation of popular support for armed resistance, especially
among the Pashtuns, who comprise 40 percent of the population.

The trade in producing
and trafficking narcotics is a chronically destabilising factor, whose
financial gains are the key element in powering terrorist groups in
Afghanistan. UN figures indicate that, in 2011 alone, the growth in the
production of opium in Afghanistan rose by 60 percent, and the total area of
opium cultivation by 7 percent.

Measures have been
taken in the past year-and-a-half to combat this situation. Peace conferences
were held during 2010 and 2011 in London, Kabul and Bonn, resulting in the
announcement of a whole string of resolutions. In London, for example,
President Hamid Karzai proposed a hypothetical conciliation with militants who
renounce both contact with al-Qaeda and participation in terrorist activities,
along with acknowledging the Afghan Constitution.

The Kabul
International Conference of June 2010 saw the launch of the so-called “Kabul
Process” – a gradual transfer of power to the Afghan authorities, including
control of the key issues of security and the social and economic development
of the country. The following resolutions were rubber-stamped at the
conference: “The Framework for Transfer of Responsibility” (comprising the
parameters for the handover of responsibility for the country's security and
the establishment of critical tasks for national development to the Afghan
government) and the “Peace and Reintegration Programme” (the conditions
necessary for the reintegration of armed militant rebels into civil society)
and should be completed by 2014 – in other words, before the date of planned
withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

Even so, the signed
agreements between Afghanistan and the USA on a strategic partnership provide
for an agreed force, of between 40,000 and 50,000 American troops, to remain in
Afghanistan at military bases created for this purpose. This can be seen as a
kind of insurance policy should complications or internal factions arise which
threaten the Afghan authorities.

The successful
implementation of these measures, including the gradual handover of complete
responsibility and power for the management and control of Afghanistan's
provinces to local authorities, would be a significant shift towards stability
in the country. However, it is still too early to predict their outcome. They
have only just come into force, and the process of conciliation between warring
sides will be a far-from-simple matter.

Afghan sources
indicate that the Taliban side demands amendments to the Constitution, whereas
President Karzai, by contrast, demands the present Constitution be recognised
by the Taliban without alteration. The Taliban also wants the withdrawal of
foreign military forces from Afghan Territory and the recognition of the
Taliban movement as a legitimate segment of the Afghan political process. This
calls for the involvement of the Taliban in Afghanistan’s state structures and
establishing Taliban representative centres in Afghan cities (effectively
meaning a dual power system). Also in the list of demands is the removal of the
Taliban from the UN Security Council's blacklist of terror organisations and
the release of Taliban members held in prisons.

It would be fair to
mention that Karzai has in fact already initiated some amendments to the
Constitution along the lines which the Taliban require. But this is a complex
process which must be undertaken through Loya Jirga - the
Pashtun-named “Council Of Elders”, formed from tribal representatives, which
comes into being to resolve critical situations.

Matters are
complicated further by the fact that, according to Afghan political
commentators, 50 percent of the population is under the influence of the
Taliban. They include not only the Pashtuns, but other ethnic groups. Thus, the
Taliban actions that began recently in northern Afghanistan are of great
concern, not only to Kabul, but to nations in Afghanistan's ambit, including
Russia.

Recent years have
brought nothing new to Afghan lives. They greeted the new millennium with the
usual schisms in tribal, ethnic and religious affairs, and feeble core
governance. Add the never-ending civil war to these woes and we see a country
that has been brought to its knees amid even further resentment and violence.

Thus, the internal
political situation in Afghanistan may have undergone changes, but they have
far from simplified matters, especially if compared with the status quo of ten
years previously, when the Taliban had been booted out of the process entirely,
and control of the country was shared in tandem between the “American Afghans”
and representatives of the Mujahideen, the so-called “Northern Alliance”.

After the Taliban was
ousted, disagreement immediately erupted between Karzai and his entourage on
one hand, and the leadership of the “Northern Alliance” on the other.
Squabbling over ministerial posts in the country’s new government and
parliament has failed to die down, and continues to this day. The National
Front of Afghanistan (NFA), which emerged from the background of the Northern
Alliance, and includes members of the former National Democratic Party of
Afghanistan, positions itself as a separate entity from Afghan émigrés. The
return of these émigrés to the country was engineered with the connivance of
forces of the international coalition.

This latter
grouping has formed the so-called Republican Party, which is intended to defend
its interests.

The National
Front of Afghanistan, along with some smaller political factions, promotes a
platform of reform, rather than identifying itself as an opposition party. It
presses in particular for a parliamentary system of government, elections for
regional governors, and more substantive transformation of the social and
economic spheres.

The only area in which
the so-called opposition is united with the ruling majority is the necessity of
continued armed struggle against the Taliban, who show no signs of
capitulation.

Bickering among the
representatives of governmental authority is worsened by ethnic conflicts
(between the Pashtun South and the non-Pashtun North), religious animosity
(between Sunnis, Shiites, and Buddhists) and tribal antagonisms. Armed clashes
continue to take place between regional warlords for spheres of influence, as
well as with the central government. One example of the inter-ethnic violence
in the struggle for posts in the government was the assassination of
Burhanuddin Rabbani last year, who was head of the Peace Council and an ethnic
Tajik.

The author is Ambassador Extraordinary and
Plenipotentiary, Advisor to the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign
Ministry.